


The Four Heroes - a Very Serious Study

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, I spend my free time in weird ways, I'm Sorry, I've wanted to do this since I read Problem Sleuth back in January, M/M, Quest, Retelling, Shenanigans, The Cathedral of Syndetic Ascension, The Four Kingdoms, but messing with the plot a bit, four characters from Homestuck fill in for the Four Heroes from Problem Sleuth, joke AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 17:44:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11583054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: It is sometimes said that in a fictional, code-strung land full of treacherous, weirdly difficult to escape offices, there arose Four Heroes unlike any our world has ever known. They came from each of the kingdoms of that glitchy, artificial realm - Karkat, Ferocious Warrior of the Weasels, Sollux, the Ever-Sarcastic Elf Mage, Tavros the Just, a Hog/Bull (???) Cleric of Vast Renown, and, of course, Gamzee, Illustrious Bard of Clownkind, known forever for his insanely fresh lute solos.Hear now their tale!Or, you know.  A version of it.





	The Four Heroes - a Very Serious Study

**Author's Note:**

> I mean no offense to anybody. :) And also... I tried to get most Problem Sleuth details right, but I'm sorry if I messed up!!!  
> Have a great day.

_It is sometimes said that in a fictional, code-strung land full of treacherous, weirdly difficult to escape offices, there arose Four Heroes unlike any our world has ever known. They came from each of the kingdoms of that glitchy, artificial realm - Karkat, Ferocious Warrior of the Weasels, Sollux, the Ever-Sarcastic Elf Mage, Tavros the Just, a ~~Hog~~ Bull (???) Cleric of Vast Renown, and, of course, Gamzee, Illustrious Bard of Clownkind, known forever for his insanely fresh lute solos._

_Hear now their tale!_

_Or, you know.  A version of it._

_A couple scenes from a version of it, to be more accurate._

_Ahem._

So the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION, right?  It had seemed kinda honorable, when the Four Heroes were first told they’d have to climb that hulking beast of a tower.  Like something other questing sorts did, in novels and stuff.  It would be, like, a trilogy of blockbuster movies, with soaring music and golden, mythic lighting.  Right?  They’d probably forgotten they were extras in a video game, at the time.  Or extras in an online comic about a video game that could conceivably exist…   _Details_ , you know how it is.  So hard to keep the universes tidy sometimes!

At any rate, those Four Heroes had also clearly forgotten that the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION would mostly feature milky, lukewarm lighting and a lot of stairs.  Not exactly “blockbuster movie” stuff right there, even if the place _did_ form a vital link between two halves of their almost-universe.  Stairs and monsters, monsters and stairs, and not a whole lot of bathrooms.  Those the Four Heroes found were really badly kept, too – spider web-y and smeared all over with some of the most gelatinous, smelly monster slime you could imagine.  All the toilet paper was practically always uncoiled over the floor.

At least Gamzee was kind enough to provide occasional HEROIC QUESTING LUTE SOLOS as they climbed, scattered in with his INCENDIARY LUTE SOLOS and EXPERIMENTAL CLOWN RAP SESSIONS.  Tavros would’ve told anyone it helped a lot, especially given that he had a sack of GIGANTIC HEALING SPELL BOOKS to lug around.  He was relatively new to the Cleric-ing business, and all those fancy titles came along with his cherished CROOK OF FEALTY, so _ow_.  All Karkat had to carry was a sword to FLIP THE FUCK OUT with and his DETACHABLE WEASEL TAIL!  It just wasn’t fair at all.  Sollux the ELF MAGE had a SNAZZY POINTED WIZARD HAT – all the rage among elves, he swore up and down even though no one really believed him – and all his “majyyk” spells completely memorized.  _Like a badass_ , he requested all chroniclers of their heroic, CATHERDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION-related deeds to note.  Like an actual badass.

One night – it was probably night, because all of them were exhausted, but who even really knew what with everything being digital ink on a paper-white screen around them – the Four Heroes were gathered by a campfire they’d built along a particularly long and winding stretch of stairs.  They’d discovered pretty early in that if Tavros was willing to sacrifice a few of the stupider pages from his spell books – how to cure the common cold among butterflies, for instance – and Gamzee aimed some SICK FIRES from his trusty lute in just the right direction, they could get a pretty good fire going.  They’d also learned that if they made campfires in battle rooms, monsters just continued to spawn.  It was like resetting the page, sticking around on one floor. 

Video games could be weird like that, so comics of video games could be weird like that, too.  Just go with it.  Like Gamzee’d insisted, the first time Karkat had an emotional breakdown watching the monster they’d just defeated flicker, gather up its blood in a sea of pixels, and stare down menacingly at them again…  Sometimes it helped not to think about any of that motherfucking hilarious “universe” shit.  They had to go beat the crap out of DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN, you know, bro?  That was their motherfucking divine calling or whatever.  Gotta just let shit happen, sometimes.

So there they were, on the stairs, with a gaping abyss on either side of them, howling with the kind of musty, tired wind you mostly only got in absurdly tall cathedrals.  

No one, it could be said, had warned the Four Heroes about the stairs.  Not how it would be to sleep on stairs, or eat an absurd amount of SALTED MELONS while crouching along them and trying not to drip melon juice on all their stuff.  Karkat almost dropped his cute little WEASEL EAR HEADBAND down them one time, and that would’ve _sucked_.  He’d have had to hear things with only his normal pointed, grey ears, and that wasn’t really what weasels did, you know?

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  The Four Kingdoms of that artificial almost-video game world had been at constant war for centuries!  Weasels insisted on eating ELF EGGS, for some reason…  Yeah, Karkat – we’re looking at _you_.  Elves stole CLOWN PIES off unsuspecting windowsills, even when those pies were meant for the enormous WEAPONIZED JACK-IN-THE-BOX wielding CLOWN KING, or an especially funny RITUAL SLAPSTICK PERFORMANCE.  Nevermind the creepy ramifications of how fond that Clown Kingdom seemed to be of slapping ~~hog~~ bull asses.  Just all the time, if the newspapers were to be believed…   Yeah.  ~~Hogs~~ Bulls always stole weasels’ MELONS, too, which was weird because weasels were generally carnivorous.  Right?   I mean, with those sharp teeth and all.  Why were they even growing MELONS?

Whatever the reasons, it’s common, even grade school knowledge that the Four Kingdoms had been at war for so long it was pretty much impossible to imagine their chosen heroes having a swell old time climbing a bunch of stairs.  _“So what gives, Narrator?”_ you ask me.  _“So they’re all just holding hands in a circle around a campfire, communing in harmony as the stairs stretch up to floor 66,666 and the waiting battle against DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN?  You expect me to believe that?”_

Well, first off, we’ll take a look at what Gamzee the CLOWN BARD and Tavros the ~~HOG~~ BULL CLERIC were up to around that gosh darn fire.  Playing a motherfucking _trading card game_ , that’s what.  Gamzee had finally gotten a hang of the rules, and the latest pack he’d opened had not one but _two_ RARE HOLOGRAPHIC TRADING CARDS inside, so shit was going pretty good.  Tavros had agreed to go on a date with him back in what they had taken to calling THE REAL WORLD, if he could actually beat him in an EPIC STAIRCASE TRADING CARD SHOWDOWN.  Even their REAL WORLD wasn’t so real, but that was okay.  Gamzee knew just the kind of pie he’d bake up all special for Tavros, if they ever did go on that date…  And with _those_ kinds of recipes getting all motherfucking composed in his head, alongside some ROMANTIC JESTER RAPS, slapping Tavros’s ass and getting him pissed off was honestly the last thing Gamzee was about to do. 

He’d never really been into that whole ass-slapping scene anyway, in much the same way Gamzee Makaras in other universe might not be so much into the “Subjugglation of Lowbloods and Unfunny Blaspheming Motherfuckers” scene.  Much more into the hilarious honk-horns if you leave him to his own devices, that guy.  And you didn’t get to be an actual MOTHERFUCKING LUTE MASTER by chasing ~~hogs~~ bulls around all the damn time.  Shit took a lot of practice.  It definitely wasn’t just intense, chaotic strumming, headbanging along and occasionally striking gangsta clown rap poses.

No, definitely not.

Gamzee was currently losing that EPIC STAIRCASE TRADING CARD SHOWDOWN, losing pretty hard. 

Tavros was cackling something like, “And, and now if I just activate the SOUTHWEST COUNTER-CLOCKWISE TRAP CARD and set it into ANTI-ATTACK POSITION, I can draw up to a full hand from the LOST TO MEMORY PILE!”

And Gamzee groaned, “Aw shit, bro!  That move was too good!  I don’t even stand a chance, do I?”

“You better, um, believe it!”  Tavros laughed into his billowy Cleric’s sleeve, hog bull mask slipping a little bit so Gamzee could see just the edge of his smile.    

You can probably imagine the scene.  They had roasted some MELON CHUNKS on Tavros’s CROOK OF FEALTY, even.  It was kind of motherfucking friendly up on those stairs.

_“Okay, Narrator,”_ you might be saying, now. _“So that’s Gamzee and Tavros taken care of.  I guess.  What about all that egg eating?  Surely the WEASEL WARRIOR and the ELF MAGE were sort of ‘ew gross’ towards each other, right?”_

Well, I guess they were at first.  Sollux had definitely given Karkat the majyyk cold shoulder for the first couple thousand staircases.  I mean literally, of course.  The “GIVE YOUR OPPONANT FREEZING SHOULDERS” spell was pretty standard fair among most of your ELF MAGES back in those days.  Karkat had offered to carry Tavros’s sack of GIGANTIC HEALING SPELLBOOKS for a while, even, just to feel a little excruciating warmth along his shoulders.  But then they’d ended up talking about hacking, and their favorite video games, and whether or not they’d make it out of the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION in time for the release date of something really not-too-shitty looking called SGRUB ALPHA: FOUR KINGDOMS EDITION. 

“Probably not,” Sollux had reasoned.  “We’re probably doomed to die here, somewhere completely unremarkable like floor 24,742.  Or else, even if we _do_ make it out alive, DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN is definitely going to turn us to bloody goo.  Bloody goo, dripping all over this twice-damned, stupidly tall cathedral.”

“Probably,” Karkat had answered, before Gamzee was able to rustle up a RIDICULOUSLY OPTIMISTIC LUTE SOLO OF MORALE LIFTING PROWESS.  Before Tavros was able to mutter shyly about believing in their abilities as a team.  “Yeah, we’re probably all fucking screwed.”

So they’d bonded over being pessimistic buzzkills, basically.  It helped when Karkat confided that eating ELF EGGS was actually kind of creepy, as they were not that different from WEASEL EGGS if you really thought about. 

Even though really weasels in the WORLD BEYOND THE COMPUTER weren’t known for laying EGGS _or_ eating MELONS.  Even so.  Somehow.

Karkat’s frozen shoulders still hadn’t completely melted by the time they were gathered around that particular campfire on that particular staircase, but he was feeling a lot more alive and leader-y.  He was definitely ready to FLIP THE FUCK OUT at some monsters, now that he could lift his sword up above his head again.  It had been a pretty good day.  He’d been able to draw his weasel-y whiskers on his face by himself and everything.   

“Next up is room number 33,333,” Karkat announced, as if someone had paid him to provide appropriate exposition.  Nobody had, I assure you – I would know, as a Narrator.  It was just very generous of him.  “So we’re about halfway through this fucking mess.”

“DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN’s attacks keep shaking the cathedral,” Tavros mused, lowering his hand of trading cards, glancing to Gamzee all worried-like.  Gamzee offered a goofy smile, though of course he’d felt the rattling, lurching cathedral, too.  Of course he’d thought about what might happen, if they fell from a height like this… If their stairway snapped like a spine.  It was way too possible.

“The fight’s really raging up there without us,” Sollux said, voice the kind of bitter it only really got when he was thinking about all the many, many reasons their quest had always been avoidable.  His POINTY MAGE HAT could never exactly look threatening – more like he was perpetually on his way to FOUR KINGDOMS BOY WIZARD BOOKS LAND – but there was something in his mismatched, majyyk-crackling eyes just then that made him look like he’d seen a lot of battles.  You know, a lot of battles _before_ the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION. 

“That’s why we’ve _got_ to get up there, asshole,” Karkat said, insistent, jabbing a finger way up the stairs.  So, so many stairs.  Probably only Karkat would’ve tempted a wielder of the GIVE YOUR OPPONANT FREEZING SHOULDERS spell right about then, with his arm still thawing.  He was sitting in a puddle of melted shoulder-ice even as he spoke. “Maybe we’re the tipping point – maybe we’re what will really help PROBLEM SLEUTH win!  There must be some reason we’re climbing all these fucking stairs!”

“Yeah,” Sollux shot back, though there was something kind of like camaraderie in the curl of his lip.  His fangs were all jumbled together and way longer than most of the ELF MAGES who made it in Four Kingdoms Hollywood, so they sometimes cut into the edges of his lips.  It made his smiles a little raw, a little painful.  Karkat privately assumed it meant Sollux had to really mean every smile, which is just the kind of thing you’d think about a friend.  Even an ELF MAGE, even in the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION. “It’s because we’re disposable extras, making a point about the kingdoms uniting.  Some bullshit like that.  I get it now.  We’re going to die to prove some grand point or whatever.”        

“Or we could get POSSESSED BY PLOT SHENANIGANS, even,” Tavros murmured, hugging his long Cleric robe-y arms around himself, knees folded up to his chin.  His ~~hog~~ bull mask was getting pushed up on his forehead a little, so his eyes were completely hidden away.  “You never know what could happen.  We could all become villains.  We could forget we’re friends for a gag, and all of a sudden start representing the worst in all our societies…  We could even gang up with DEMONHEAD MOBSTER KINGPIN to make a different kind of point, a point about people never really changing…”  Tavros’s lip quivered a little bit, behind his mask.  He sniffled softly, and the golden rings up his pointy grey ears caught the firelight.

“Enough with that noise, man,” Gamzee said, fiddling with his lute just a little, glancing around for something to _do_ , something to shake things up with.  Each pluck of his lute was loud in that place, with only the wind and the roar of distant monsters, distant battles, all around.  His eyes landed on the trading cards still spread out between himself and his ~~HOG~~ BULL CLERIC crush.  Motherfucking _bingo_.  “If you shuffle those cards up we could play another game, Tavros.  All of us.  Right?”

“This game isn’t four-player,” Tavros snuffled, face buried in his sleeves.  He thought for a second, and then offered, “But I guess we could do teams.” 

Gamzee adjusted the tattered, whimsically colorful clown ruff around his neck and set to shuffling those cards as well as he could.  No one could necessarily see how whimsically colorful that clown ruff was, what with the black-and-white computer-y world they’d been dreamt into, but still.  Only a few cards slipped out of Gamzee’s hands and down into the murky, howling abyss, which he figured was pretty motherfucking good luck.  

“I call dibs on Sollux’s team,” Karkat announced.  “Except I’m the goddamn leader, you got that?”

_There.  There you go.  Now do you believe me?  For lo, the Four Heroes did truly find each other whilst climbing the dreaded CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION.  It’s amazing what extras get up to, when all the cameras – or tablets, or typing fingers, or whatever the fuck you want – are focused elsewhere.  It is, dare I say, the stuff of especially well-regarded lute ballads._

_The brotherly bonds those Four Heroes forged by bickering over RARE HOLOGRAPHIC TRADING CARDS would be tested, you better believe it, in all the hundreds of floors to come, each with their own ridiculous, respawning monster battles.  Hundreds of harrowing, ballad-worthy monster battles._

_Yet even so – even knowing the perils our intrepid heroes faced on every one of those 66,666 floors – nothing shook this daring band to the core so completely as what happened with GARNGHUT BLISTERSHOD, DAMNED SENTRY OF THE POTBELLIED EXILES, on floor 66,665!_

   What happened was, basically, Karkat the WEASEL WARRIOR got himself stomped to death.   

The fight had gone pretty okay before that.  They had kind of a rhythm going, by that point – Gamzee would strum up some explosive blasts and/or bursts of fire from his lute, Sollux would conjure wisps of ancient elven majyyk which definitely did something, and Karkat would FLIP THE FUCK OUT all over the place.  Tavros would heal everybody and provide a running commentary, only occasionally getting whacked in the head by Sollux’s flailing wand.  It was a good system, really.  By all rights, after so much practice, everything _should’ve_ worked out. 

Maybe it was something to do with GARNGHUT BLISTERSHOD, himself – he _was_ guarding the second to last floor, after all.  He was especially good at stomping, too, what with having feet like tree trunks from an especially deep and ancient forest.  One of his eye-sets was furious, and the other huge and sleepy.  He smelled like he’d climbed the entire CATHEDRAL without stopping in any of the gross bathrooms to see if the shower taps worked.  (They usually didn’t.)  He was probably kind of pissy because he was almost as huge as the room he’d been set to guard for all time – also, all he’d really had to do while waiting for challengers was watch the static of digital stars outside.  There wasn’t even a magazine bin or whatever.

So even if the fight started like any of the other 66,664 before it – Karkat tried to give a HEROIC PEP-TALK that ended with Sollux’s conclusion that everyone was going to die… Tavros shifted his sack of GIGANTIC HEALING SPELL BOOKS and made sure his ~~hog~~ bull mask was on nice and tidy… Gamzee played a few experimental chords on his lute, music all sparking and ready to catch fire….  The battle against GARNGHUT BLISTERSHOD soon turned frantic.  You should’ve heard Tavros’s commentary – a lot of “Gamzee’s, uh, flying now… And rapping a ballad right into the monster’s eyes!  Heh!  Yeah!”  or “Karkat FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT so hard he almost broke the window!  Falling down 66,665 flights would’ve been, hm, really, really awful.  Geez, Karkat… Um.  Careful.”

All the while, the arrow pointing up the very last flight of stairs taunted them, painted on the wall just behind the DAMNED SENTRY.  Now that I think of it, that was probably another thing seriously ticking GARNGHUT BLISTERSHOD off…  Even if he could have left that one accursed room instead of being dragged, pixels and soul, to do battle there eternally, he wouldn’t have been able to fit up the stairway.  That arrow must have taunted him, too.

The monsters all through the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION were pretty different, our Four Heroes had observed over their journey.  Some of them howled curses as they died… Some of them spat noxious slime which Gamzee had tried baking into MONSTER SLIME PIES before Karkat screamed some sense into him.  This was the first and only time our valiant crew had watched someone get stomped before, though.

Gamzee gaped when it happened, fingers coiled over his lute as if to strum another monster-blasting rhyme that just didn’t come.  Sollux smacked himself in the forehead, sighing out an _“Oh shit”_ that sounded suspiciously like an _“I told you so_.”  It was all kinds of heartbreaking, really.  The tragic song Gamzee would later compose about Karkat’s crumpled WEASEL EAR HEADBAND lying there beneath the monster’s foot, a friend once yelling incoherently now lost to murderous stomping… Damn.  That little ditty would bring hundreds of clown audiences to gloppy, pie filling-laced tears. 

There was inky blood sinking into the stone of that place – or maybe there was blood pooling out across lush and gleaming marble – or maybe blood was seeping into the kind of rickety wood that might groan ominously whenever GARNGHUT shifted his massive self.  It was hard to tell, with the way the panel was drawn.  But then there was Tavros, dragging over one of his ENORMOUS HEALING SPELL BOOKS.  He took a quick glance inside, turned to one of the blue page markers near the back of Volume 345, _Intermediate Lessons of Compassion and Hallowed ~~Porcine~~ Bovine Wisdom.  _

And then he swiveled his CROOK OF FEALTY to enact a spell of ~~PORCINE~~ BOVINE INTERVENTION.  Now, we here at Narrators, Inc. know how that panel might look to you, what with that brave ~~HOG~~ BULL CLERIC conking himself in the face with his very own CROOK OF FEALTY, but we assure you that both Tavros’s bloody nose and cracked mask were necessary for the spell to work. 

“Heh.  Ow,” Tavros choked out, taking his mask completely off to dab away some of the blood from his nose.  “That, um, definitely _should_ have done something.”

 Tavros’s spell did do something, but Karkat’s resurrection was nothing like a tidy gathering-back of pixel blood, the way the SENTRIES managed whenever their little worlds reset… And it didn’t come along with an accompanying PIXIE ~~HOG~~ BULL CHOIR, the way Tavros had seen the spell work on the heroic dead back home.  (People got lifted up in a playful breath of wind, surrounded by flower petals in all the many thousands upon thousands of colors in their soul… No big deal, really.)  No, Karkat FLIPPED THE FUCK OUT back to life, screaming something about there being an absurd number of stairs leading the way to the GATES OF WEASEL HEAVEN, too.  He slapped his broken WEASEL EAR HEADBAND back on and started hacking at the air all above and around him, as if trying to slash away the foot that had been shuffled away ages before.  Or else just throwing some kind of WEASEL WARRIOR temper tantrum.  His screams were pretty intense, too – _lots_ of colorful, excessively long metaphors.

“I guess it’ll take him a while to fully accept what happened,” Sollux said, shrugging, scratching under his hat with his ELF MAGE wand. 

“Maybe… Maybe he’ll snap out of it soon?” Tavros suggested.  He had stuffed some less-useful spell pages up his nose, and the bleeding probably had to give it a rest sooner or later.

“This one’s for you, bro,” Gamzee said, sidling up to Karkat as if he _wasn’t_ attacking the air like he wanted to slit a million ghost-throats.  In fact, Gamzee was already strumming out an insane lute solo of celebration.  No CLOWN BARD before him had managed such intense, heartfelt chords; no CLOWN BARD before him had ever rapped about friendship with so much fire.  His fingers were like wind-up chattering teeth, they were so motherfucking fast.  His raw, brutal honesty was like a spurt from someone’s trick flower – it made you jump, and got your eyes pretty damn wet unless you were one of those straight-faced motherfuckers wearing sunglasses all the time.  Tavros, Sollux and GARNGHUT BLISTERSHOD, DAMNED SENTRY OF THE POTBELLIED EXILES, stood in a row, transfixed.

A single tear trickled from one of GARNGHUT’s two angrier eyes. 

It was a moment unlike any other, what with the blistering lute solo, what with Karkat’s sword going fucking everywhere – or it would have been, if this wasn’t just an alternate universe to an alternate universe to a webcomic about a video game that no one has actually played before.  But oh well, right?  Them’s the breaks.  Sometimes.

_Alas for our digital travelers!  Brave and stalwart HEROES FOUR, they still had stairs left to climb, a monster or two yet to face!  Perhaps things would go to shit, too, just as Sollux – nay, Tavros! – foretold!_

_Let it be said though – it was a worthy quest.  For if it could be nothing else, let it be that: worthy.  How many thousands of long and unnecessary staircases have we climbed, in our cozy lives, far from the intangible Internet-Realm?  How many side quests have we embarked on just to gain EXP and maybe a little refill soap for the CATHEDRAL OF SYNDETIC ASCENSION’S bathrooms?  _

_None._

_O, but what is the meaning of a worthy quest?_

_That the stairs were climbed._

_That the foe was foul and vicious indeed._

_That all the songs are still sung today –_

_If not in one universe, then another._


End file.
